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Dabney on Women’s Rights: Was he Right?

When the vox populi (voice of the people) resounds with rebellion and ignorance I find strength in the Word of God. “Let my cry come before You O Lord; Give me understanding according to Your word” (Psalm119:169). I also find encouragement from my dead theologian’s library. Many of their predicted insights are working out in history. One I particularly enjoy reading is Robert L. Dabney. I recently realized that the vox populi will determine the political path of this country. If a woman is elected president by the majority of people of this country, the feminization of this country will be evident. The tragedy is that many people, men and women, will vote for a woman just because she is a woman.

When the women’s rights movement accelerated at the end of the 19th century, orthodox evangelicalism was declining and evolution opened the floodgates for atheism. During the rise of modern influences, Robert L. Dabney wrote an article entitled “Women’s Rights Women.” Dabney respected the Word of God as the final authority in life, unlike the majority of modern evangelicalism. However, he wrote with an eye on the logic of language. Dabney observed that the wife could not give up her relation to the family without consequences. “If she enters the marriage relation refusing all subordination and insisting upon full equality, then she must take her chance of finding the union a temporary copartnership, terminable at any time by the suit of either party. She has her Jacobin freedom, but she has sunk herself from the wife to the concubine” (The Practical Philosophy, p. 369). [Jacobin was the political party during the French Revolution positing absolute/perfect equality.]

The closing words of Dabney’s article published in 1871 were prophetic since after only five generations, his words are resoundingly coming to haunt the American culture.

Thus will be consummated that destiny to which so many gloomy prognostics point as the allotment of the North American continent: to be the accursed field for the final illustration of the harvest of perdition, grown from the seeding of the dragon’s teeth of infidel Radicalism. God gave the people of this land great and magnificent blessings, and opportunities and responsibilities. They might and should have made it the glory of all lands. But they have betrayed their trust: they have abused every gift: above all have they insulted him flaunting in his face an impudent, atheistic, God-defying theory of pretended human rights and human perfectibility which attempts to deny man’s subordination, his dependence, his fall and native depravity, his need of divine grace. In invites mankind to adopt material civilization and sensual advantage as their divinity. It assumes to be able to perfect man’s condition by its political, literary, and mechanical skill, despising that Gospel of Christ which is man’s only adequate remedy. It crowns its impiety by laying its defiling hands upon the very forms of that Christianity, while with the mock affection of a Judas it attempts to make it a captive to the sordid ends of Mammon and sense. Must not God be avenged on such a nation as this? His vengeance will be to give them the fruit of their own hands, and let them be filled with their own devices. He will set apart this fair land by a sort of dread consecration to the purpose of giving a lesson concerning this godless philosophy, so impressive as to instruct and warn all future generations. As the dull and pestilential waves of the Dead Sea have been to every subsequent age the memento of the sin of Sodom, so the dreary tides of anarchy and barbarism, which will overwhelm the boastful devices of infidel democracy, will be the caution of all future legislators. And thus “women’s rights” will assist America “to fulfill her great mission,” that of being the “scarecrow” of the nations.

Dabney’s article expresses rational, logical, and intellectual insight into the following passages of Scripture: Ephesians 5:22ff; 1 Corinthians 2:9; 1 Timothy 2:11-14; Titus 2:5. These are great verses for the “but theologians” to ponder and reply with this response: “I know what the Bible teaches, but I believe………..

Has the United States become a scarecrow among the nations? Have the brains of the general public been absconded by ungodly political and religious leaders. The scarecrow in the “Wizard of Oz” affirmed that notion in his culture. “Well, some people without brains do an awful lot of talking don’t they?